


a heavy heart

by fiveyaaas



Series: open your heart [10]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Abusive Reginald Hargreeves, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Character Study, Childhood Friends, Dark Vanya Hargreeves, F/M, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Morally Ambiguous Character, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Regret, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:14:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29349513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: “heavy heart: a great deal of sadness”
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: open your heart [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138898
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	a heavy heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soitgoes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soitgoes/gifts).



> Please read all tags before you read this fic!!! I don’t go into major details with anything, but I don’t want to upset any readers!!! It will not affect your understanding of this series at all if you skip any of the fics within it.

Sometimes it was easier to tell himself that he’d never found her body. He could deny that the scorched body beside the others wasn’t hers for years, could tell himself that it was just the person who’d killed them all and all of the world.

Never had he thought to connect those two people together.

He could feel his energy quickly depleting from him, but he didn’t want his final moments to be with his eyes closed in pain. 

Maybe he was wasting his last bits of life on opening them, but he had to see her. He could recognize now, all of the mistakes he’d made. 

When they’d first become friends, at about six years old, Five had been somewhat convinced she could read his thoughts, that she’d had a power all along but refused to tell anyone about it. The older he got, he realized she just knew what he was thinking because she understood _him,_ and, really, he should have been able to tell sooner, too. If she had a thought she wanted to convey but couldn’t, all it would take was a quick glance, and he’d understand. 

He wondered if she could see what he was thinking now. He hoped that she could see the apologies he wanted to say within his eyes. Five knew that he’d be dead in a few minutes, but he could accept that. The entire world was ending, simply because he’d refused to stay at her side a few moments longer. 

Foolishly, he’d thought pushing her away would _protect_ her. He’d comforted himself that, as soon as he’d stopped the world from ending, he would be able to spend as much time with her as he wanted. It would all be done, and he would have time for apologies then. The thing was… there hadn’t been enough _time._ If he had wasted all of it telling her what he’d wanted to say for the past forty-five years, she would have died, as would have the world. 

Would he have even been able to figure it out, though? If he had stayed? Likely, she wouldn’t have stopped taking her pills, so there wouldn’t have been an apocalypse in the first place. 

And, oh, how he felt for her. Only losing his family would be worse than losing his powers. He could take anything else outside of those things being stolen from him, but his powers were an essential part of who he was. The anxiety that would flare up down his spine when he just ran out of energy in using them was enough to nearly cause him to break down a few times. Living through starvation and exhaustion in the wasteland had made him lose all access to them, and it had been one of the more horrifying aspects. For her to have had them taken away from her so young… He could understand her fear of them being stolen from her again, and he was pretty sure Allison had been able to understand as well. 

Allison had told them to just let her be. If he’d just listened, if he’d just been there for Vanya, none of this likely would have happened. 

_‘Please know that I’m sorry,’_ he thought, watching the inhuman glow to her eyes and wondering if she’d ever really had a chance to not become what she was now. _‘Please know that I_ should _have forgiven you the second I’d found out. You aren’t a cruel person; I know that this isn’t you.’_

But, then, he supposed it really _was_ her. This was the result of thousands of moments of neglect and abandonment, of her body going through a withdrawal from medicine she’d been on since she was a child. 

Once, during training, when they’d only been numbers still, Two had snapped at Three, yelling, ‘Why do you always use your powers? It’s cheating.’

She’d actually looked the slightest bit confused, unabashedly telling him, ‘Wouldn’t you use them too? If you had them?’ Diego had gotten pissed, but it had actually made a lot of sense to Five. He’d frequently used his own when it was even _less_ necessary, perfectly comfortable with the kleptomania he’d had since a young age, especially when he got a little older and started regularly killing.

And, yeah, ending the world wasn’t how people should respond to this sort of thing, but she clearly wasn’t entirely aware of what she was doing. Plus, if everybody had the ability to end the world, _especially_ unintentionally, as soon as they experienced something so drastic, the world would have ended trillions of times over. 

It was easy to blame her, but, really, what would have anyone expected when she’d never been taught how to control this? Ben had killed quite a few _innocent_ people on one of their earliest missions, after having been pushed too much in training, causing Reginald to only make things worse when he’d scolded Ben for forcing him to have to cover that up. Then there was the (many) times that they’d gotten fractures from Luther when he’d been learning how to moderate his powers. Her power, by nature, was a destructive thing, and instead of helping her control it, Reginald had simply taken it away from her. Of _course_ that would one day come back to bite him in the ass, but instead of it hurting him, it hurt the entirety of the world. He’d raised them to stop the apocalypse, yet he’d been the one to force it into existence. 

If he could speak, he’d tell her that he understood, but he couldn’t do much more than open his mouth. 

He hoped that she could read it on his face, that they’d never lost the connection they’d once had. Because if they had, it would have been his own doing, leaving her behind in that house, all because he’d wanted to see what his own limits were. Really, it was both of their powers together that had created the end. 

Maybe his corpse would be scorched beyond recognition as well.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!💕


End file.
